Ethics and Leadership News

Tim Cook's Leadership Opportunity: Painting the Apple Green

With some risk, but the prospect of great reward, Tim Cook can polish Apple as a company willing to change while emphasizing its greatest asset: the love of a design aesthetic that also meets the moral and lifestyle expectations of its customers, its fans -- and even its critics.

In a recent piece in Wired, Professors Bruce Kogut and Jerry Kim discussed the leadership opportunity for Apple CEO Tim Cook — particularly on improving workers' rights in China and confronting issues around outsourcing and technology job training — and how it could be good for business.

"Those in a homogeneous group put much less effort into the task at hand in part because they were more interested in avoiding conflict. Diverse environments allowed people to focus on the task instead of their social relationship."

“What makes countries rich is how productively they use their resources…Once a (more productive) technology is introduced, do people use it? Why aren’t people using the most improved technologies to begin with?”

Research Reports

The Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Center for Leadership and Ethics is the umbrella for all activities and research on leadership, ethics and governance at Columbia Business School.